Word: lifeness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first film, you may remember, the newly dead began coming back to life and feeding on the living. (Nobody knows why, although one of Dawn's characters offers this explanation: "My grandfather used to tell us, 'When there's no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the earth'"). If a zombie doesn't completely consume someone, that person also comes back to life and eats flesh. You can permanently kill them by shooting them or bashing them in the head, but since they multiply rather fast, well--one way or another, they're gonna find you, they...
...about our consumer society. Although there are heavy-handed (though valid) references to the mall as a much-beloved place, which explains the zombies' attraction to it--flickers of pleasurable memories in otherwise dead brains--Romero's satirical jabs are more skillfully displayed by the four heroes' eventual life-style and by our acceptance and enjoyment of it. Once they flush out the zombies and barricade the entrances, they have all the stores to themselves--think of it! They set up house with the finest stereo equipment, unlimited gourmet foods and wine, chic, expensive clothing, sporting goods, etc. By surrounding...
...shouldn't they? What else can you do to flesh-eating zombies? Monster movies reduce every conflict to black vs. white, good vs. evil--that's the point. But they're fantasies--they invoke the supernatural; they don't pretend that that's how it is in real life, the way John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movies do. You can't rehabilitate the alien or the zombies in Dawn-- you've got to blow them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them...
...mirror so that we can see the blood dripping from our lips. Towards the end of the film, when a militant hippie motorcycle gang invades the shopping mall disrupting our heroes' idyllic existence and attempting to steal merchandise, we root for the zombies to eat them. When this low-life scum begins to dispatch zombies with startling efficiency and even more startling relish, we think "God damn sadists," and then: "Wait a minute--weren't we cheering this before? Weren't we getting the same kick out of vicariously mauling zombies? Are we any better than this low-life scum...
Biography has always been a demanding discipline. "It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one," said Strachey. A good biographer should combine the skills of the novelist and the detective, and add to them the patience and compassion of the priest. Few people want their shortcomings exposed (biography has added a new terror to death, complained one 18th century writer), and they, or their heirs, often go to considerable trouble to hide them. Somerset Maugham asked his friends to destroy his letters; both Willa Gather and Ernest Hemingway inveighed against posthumous publication of theirs...